**8. Coherent thought**

*Urban Horticulture - Necessity of the Future*

oranges, or pomegranates, melon7

and pineapple played an important role in the

eighteenth century. In Versailles, melons were a popular fruit of the French court (they had to provide 100 melons a day in 1688), but they were also grown in large numbers at many other courts (e.g., at the Prussian court, where even *Melonerie* was held in Sanssouci near Potsdam). Melons retained their popularity, although cultivation of this fruit required a great deal of work [20]. Pineapple was also very popular, as evident from the following description: "The excellency, frangrancy, and flavor of the fruit which this plant produces needs no commendations, as it is well known to excel all the fruits hitherto cultivated; so that it is no wonder every gentleman of taste and fortune is the foundation of this polite article of gardening" [21]. Taste and money were necessary to grow this plant, as it originated from South America and Africa, thus it required a special heated greenhouse. Protective facilities for non-native plants varied and ranged from glass bells that covered individual plants, to low warm beds or large greenhouses where the south glass wall was inclined to maximize the warmth of the sunlight. There were greenhouses that fascinated with new technology in the nineteenth century and, as mentioned greenhouses that were only heated by the sun, a furnace, or a kind of hot water system. The variety of the greenhouses depended also on the plants and of course the (financial) ability of the owner. Today's greenhouses are just as diverse. Sometimes gardeners used (plastic) bottles to protect iindividual plants from frost (which is similar to the practice of protecting the plants from frost with glass bells), while large gardens usually have more sophisticated glasshouses. Maybe modern urban horticulturists could follow the example used in the Rococo garden of the summer palace of Frederick the Great, Sanssouci in Potsdam (built between 1745 and 1747), where a combination of solar heat and partial glazing is used (e.g., **Figure 13**). Namely, the palace stands on the top of a hill that was

<sup>7</sup> Until the nineteenth century, melons were considered the perfect fruit to have in the garden. In everyday use, melons were not exactly distinguished—the name "melon" was used for several different species, including melons, pumpkins, cucumbers, zucchini (from the seventeenth century onwards),

**150**

**Figure 13.**

and other fruits or vegetables [20, 22].

*The south-facing garden façade of Sanssouci in Potsdam, Germany.*

A quick look at the historic gardens and their motives and elements should give a slightly clearer picture of what man has already adapted to his needs in his gardens, and what we can draw from past knowledge. It becomes clear that man has increasingly consciously included nature in his world. Perhaps this was most evident in the 19th century, when Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928) intensely researched the idea of the ideal city and, based on the study of past thinkers (such as the Renaissance architect Filarete), he first created a plan for his ideal city. However, while the past thinkers looked at a city only as a built structure, Sir Howard incorporated the natural and cultural landscape into his city. He introduced his garden city in his publication *To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform* (1898), where one can find a Utopian city in which people live harmoniously together with nature. Thus, at the end of the nineteenth century, Sir Howard understood the city in a wider sense—he saw green-designed areas as essential components of the city. Whether we talk about gardens, parks, river landscapes, or cultural landscapes, it is not as important as the fact that built structures cannot exist without the nature. That was clear to people even before Howard's realization. For example, in the second half of the century, a city park was created in Bremen, Germany. However, the investor was not the ruler or the land, state, or any other corporation. The townspeople themselves set up the park and a society to maintain it [23]. A similar example can be found even earlier in the nineteenth century in the city of Ljubljana (now the capital of Slovenia). At the edge of Ljubljana, the idea of a great tree avenue that would provide a pleasant walking area and a space for amusement and relaxation for the citizens arose under the French government in 1813. In 1814, when the new Austrian government came to power, the project was begun but not completed. Thus, in the same year the initiative to complete the avenue was taken by the citizens, and the so-called Lattermann avenue was completed no later than 1816 [24].

More than a hundred years have passed since Howard's idea (and the realization of his garden city), and more than 200 since the citizens of Ljubljana created their own designed green space on the outskirts of the city. Today, we can praise the utopian idea of the "garden city" and admire the determination of the mentioned townspeople who connected the natural wooded hill and the old city with a designed green structure. In comparison with our surroundings, they had more natural areas at their hand, and they did not need to incorporate as many green areas into the tightly built cities as possible, the need that we have today.

Urban horticulture helps us create and materialize possibilities of incorporating nature into our cities, and we need to seize them fully so that the prediction made by the Swiss curator Klaus Littmann—that in the future we will be observing nature only in isolated spaces, similarly as we today observe animals in a zoo (especially rare or even extinct ones)—does not come true. Between September 8 and October 27, 2019, Littmann carried out a major project of planting an indigenous Carinthian mixed forest (which has almost disappeared from Carithia as it is continuously replaced by much more profitable conifer monocultures) in the Klagenfurt football stadium (e.g., **Figure 14**). This intervention that attracted masses of people is not just

**Figure 14.** *Littman, For forest (2019), Klagenfurt, Austria.*

an art project but also a warning appeal and a warning echo started by artists such as Robert Smithson (his well-known Spiral Jetty created in 1970 is located outside the urban environment, on the North Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah), or Christo and Jean-Claude (they wrapped around 178 trees in Basel in 1998) or even Joseph Beuys (he introduced and subsequently implemented the project *7000 Eichen— Stadtverwaldung statt Stadtverwaltung*, at Documenta 7 in 1982; [25, 26]).
